rossini's Stabat Mater - The Grant Park Music Festival

Friday, July 20 and Saturday, July 21, 2012
Overture to William Tell (1828-1829)
Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)
Rossini’s Overture to William Tell is scored for pairs of woodwinds
plus piccolo and English horn, four horns, two trumpets, three
trombones, timpani, percussion and strings. The performance
time is 12 minutes. The Grant Park Orchestra first performed this
work on August 1, 1936, with Gladys Welge conducting.
In his later years, Rossini wrote to an aspiring opera composer giving advice about
composing an overture for a new stage work: “Wait until the evening before the
opening. Nothing primes inspiration more than necessity, whether it be the presence
of a copyist waiting for your work or for the prodding of an impresario tearing his hair.
In my time, all the impresarios in Italy were bald at thirty. I composed the overture
to Otello in a little room in the Barbaja palace wherein the baldest and fiercest of
directors had forcibly locked me with a lone plate of spaghetti and the threat that I
would not be allowed to leave the room alive until I had written the last note. I wrote
the overture to La Gazza Ladra the day of the opening in the theater itself, where I was
imprisoned by the director and under the surveillance of four stagehands who were
instructed to throw my original text through the window, page by page, to the copyists
waiting below to transcribe it. In default of pages, they were ordered to throw me out
the window bodily. I composed the overture to Comte Ory while fishing, with my feet
in the water, and in the company of Signor Agnado, who talked of his Spanish fiancée.
The overture to William Tell was composed under more or less similar circumstances.”
Even though this admission seems to confirm both Rossini’s lazy procrastination and
his awesome ease of composition, the effort he expended on William Tell seems to
have been rather greater than his words allow.
If there was ever a composer who made a business of writing music, that composer
was Rossini. (Richard Strauss was a close runner-up.) Rossini turned out operas at a
startling rate during the twenty years of his active composing career, sometimes as
many as three or four annually. William Tell was his 38th work in the genre, finished
when he was 37 years old. His previous operas made brilliantly inventive use of the
musico-dramatic formulas and cliches of the late Classical era, and his music proved
to be precisely suited to the taste of audiences throughout Europe — he was the most
popular composer of his time. In 1824, he moved to Paris to become director of the
Théâtre Italien, and there became fully aware of the revolutionary artistic and political
trends that were then gaining prominence. In music, the Romantic movement was
heralded by such works as Carl Maria von Weber’s opera Der Freischütz, first seen in
the French capital in 1824. In politics, republican sympathies were again festering,
and stage works that portrayed the popular struggle against oppression and tyranny
stirred considerable sentiment. Auber’s opera La muette de Portici of 1828, based on
the 17th-century Neapolitan revolt against Spain, not only proved to be a popular
success, but also caught the spirit of the times in both its music and its subject. Rossini
was too closely attuned to public fashion to ignore the changing audience tastes these
pieces portended, and he cast about for a libretto that would keep him abreast of the
latest developments in the musical theater while solidifying his position in Paris.
Schiller’s play William Tell, based on the heroic Swiss struggle against tyranny in
the 14th century, had recently been introduced to Paris in a French translation, and
created much interest. Rossini decided that the drama would make a fine opera (or, at
least, a salable one), and set the minor playwright Jouy to work on the libretto. Jouy
made a botch of the undertaking (“certainly one of the poorest jobs in libretto annals,”
assessed Milton Cross), and Hippolyte Bis and Armand Marrast were called in to put
the book into final shape. Rossini seems to have taken special care to incorporate
2012 Program Notes, Book 3 A33